Necessity of No Updates
Posted: February 18, 2008 around 5:30 pm | Annotation
This weblog is largely inactive, but I’d like to give a few words why.
It began at a time where I had a lot of time on my hands. I was living at home, having left college, saving up money to go abroad. I had time. I had time to do things like sit in front of a computer monitoring sound output and waiting around for audio to transfer minute-by-minute, real time. Life changes.
There’s no way I have that sort of time now, for simple reasons. I still have all the audio I want to share, and all the equipment. However, age hasn’t done my Minidisc recorder any favors. The battery can’t hold a charge like it used to, and the right channel on the binaural microphones themselves seems to have gone sour. Most modern electronics weren’t built to last I suppose. It’s never long before they’re replaced by something better.
So really, the Manifesto of this blog that included an optimistic “Theory on How This Will Work” was really too optimistic. I’d like to think that someday I may make available an archive of some sort, but I don’t see this format going much of anywhere… even though it’d be really interesting.
So, for simply another event that was before it’s time, and whose time seems to have passed, let this be a monument. This is what might have been.
Daunting Task
Posted: November 10, 2005 around 8:26 pm | Annotation
Recently, the need for a set schedule of recording, encoding, and uploading audio has been on my mind. Much of it has already been transferred and resides on one of my happily chaotic hard drives; it merely needs organization. But a great bulk still resides in a tiny box in my bedroom cupboard :
I did a tally of fifteen remaining discs. The total came to no less than 34 hours of recorded material, containing 150 discrete tracks between November of 2002 up until last August. This certainly seems like a dreadful amount. But I’ve done the math and it’s the equivalent of recording only 1 minute 58 seconds a day—which doesn’t sound like that much. However, this doesn’t even consider the time it takes to prepare, encode, and classify all that information. Which is a lot.
And I haven’t even finalized the layout.
Please commence supplication to a higher power.
The Manifest
Posted: October 16, 2005 around 6:00 pm | Annotation
The Premise: I have accrued literally years worth of audio from various sources, on various media, and I am doing nothing with it. My trusted bionic microphones have recorded a veritable canon — a canon which includes friends sitting around and talking, walking around and people-watching with said friends, friends partying together, etc. I used to do this all the time. On occasion my microphones might record rain or other natural phenoms too; this can be nice, but not half as novel. Some of my hoardings are quite interesting and very worthy of publication.
The Irony: this sort of thing is now de rigeur. It’s called podcasting, and everyone who ever hankered for their own radio show has one. 20,000 of them in some directories. Unfortunately for me I was about two years ahead of the curve. My dreams of internet radio particapa-dom died as soon as I realized I was too cheap to buy my own website. Life’s funny that way. Now I have the place — but I need the time.
The Theory on How This Will Work: every week I unload a batch or so of recordings from ancient times. They’ll reside on my computer since I have only a gigabyte to work with server-side, and let me tell you there’s way more than a gig. BlogTorrent makes them available for download as either .torrent files or easy little executables. You download them. I’ll do my best to describe events I’ve mostly forgotten, and I ask you to fill me in whenever you can.
The Test: here goes something…
At the Getty Center
Recorded: May 5, 2003 around 2:15 pm | Audio
A short little recording today from my faithful wayback machine: the Getty Center fountain. A transient pause with Lauren and Michael in a day filled with art. Posing. Smoking more than expected. Shooting the shit. Where’s Bren? What cat scratched you?
The sound’s not too great. I’m told it was a moist day, though.
Getty Center Fountain
Date Festival
Recorded: February 20, 2003 around 7:44 pm | Audio
A trip to the Riverside County Date Festival, starring Mickey and Lauren, Angela, the kids from the center, lotsa goats (and other livestock), some awesome and not-so-awesome karaoke performances, and more than a few windchimes.
Yes windchimes. In the second track, “Wandering Ear,” I appear to have walked around for two hours recording everything in sight (so to speak). Thankfully this happens to include the one and only performance of the famed “Squidy and Pete” duo. You can also hear Angela’s triumphant and decisive win for her performance of Devo’s “Whip It” (although I can’t seem to find the performance itself—let me know if you find it). Also featured: a goat who didn’t know she was a princess. Or a princess who didn’t know she was a goat.
Give it a listen.
House Matusiak
Recorded: December 20th, 2002 — Evening | Audio
A gathering of minds and the atmosphere of an age: being at Angela and Mike’s.
I had to work hard to get this one—my MiniDisc recorder crashed and didn’t write the TOC, making the audio completely inaccessable. I had to improvise by using my old (broken) Sharp MT-15 to rewrite the whole evening as a single track.
Never listened to the whole recording except for when I was there, December 2002, almost three years ago. Look out for surprises.